Watching The Clock

As Corporate America Scrambles To Protect Itself, Pc Owners, Too, Can Take Action To Prepare Their Machines For The Millennial Switch.

January 04, 1999|By James Coates, Tribune Computer Writer.

An ordinary citizen can only fret--and maybe pray--about whether the Millennium Bug will or will not snarl global commerce, bring governments to their knees and wipe out the stock market.

But when it comes to one's personal computer, the rule of thumb becomes heaven helps those who help themselves.

It's a good idea and a relatively simple task to start this fin de siecle New Year by sitting down and finding out if your own machine has what high-powered computer consultants like to call a "Y2K hardware issue."

For PC owners, the hardware issue is whether your computer's internal clock system is set up to know that when the calendar rolls over on Dec. 31, 1999, to Jan. 1, the year will be 2000 and not 1900.

Consider the possible software headaches if your home PC or the one on your desk down at the office decides that Jan. 1, 2000, is Jan. 1, 1900:

- If you're keeping track of your appointments with a calendar program, days will be assigned to wrong dates; completed items on your to-do list will return to nag you, and things that need to be done will be marked as completed.

- If you're tracking a stock portfolio or keeping your tax data on the PC, you may find your holdings badly misstated.

- If you're trying to use the Internet on a non-Y2K compliant PC, chances are strong that you will lose many of the passwords and other information stored in the "cookie" files created to let users access key Web site features.

- A small--but likely pretty angry--knot of PC owners will find that their machines are just plain dead or some key software won't work at all because the machine or the software was licensed for a limited period that is monitored by the computer's internal clock, which concludes the license has expired.

So why not just push a button and reset the danged clock? That might work fine for your bedside alarm, but your PC's clock is a Rube Goldberg affair unlike any other timepiece ever seen.

It starts with a Real Time Clock, a timepiece that is hooked to a battery called CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) that keeps it ticking when the machine is turned off, ready to tell the computer what time it is next time you switch it on.

When you do turn the computer on, a piece of software called BIOS (Basic Input Output System) reads the CMOS clock and interprets that reading into the time and date that then gets passed to the operating system (Windows 95, DOS, etc.) that uses the settings to run software.

The software, including spreadsheets, databases or calendar-keeping programs, reads the date from the operating system and performs needed calculations accordingly.

Uncounted millions among the roughly 50 million American households now owning some sort of personal computer are learning to their dismay that because of this strange system of counting the hours, the days and the years, the same glitch built in to many corporate mainframe computers also was included in desktop machines.

To save what at the time was highly prized memory space, computer programmers and chipmakers simply dropped the first two characters from the way dates were noted both in mainframes and in the CMOS system.

The programmers and engineers responsible later said they had believed that the machines and software with the "issue" would have been retired long before 2000 arrived to trigger failures.

It didn't work out that way, of course.

"With over 350 million IBM-compatible PCs in the world, both companies and home users are facing a difficult decision: `How do I make my desktop or laptop year 2000 compliant and save my investment?' " said Caroline March-Long, chief of public relations for the About Time Group in Atlanta, which specializes in software to fix the problem (www.pcfix2000.com).

March-Long added: "Buying a new computer may not solve the problem--PCs coming off the manufacturing line today are not (necessarily) Y2K compliant." In November, she noted, Compaq Computer Corp. acknowledged that some of its recent models had been built with Y2K problems that have since been fixed.

The relatively small minority using Macintoshes are spared this problem because Apple Computer Inc. used a 32-bit system when the Mac was created back in 1984 rather than the 16-bit system in PCs. The Mac will not have a hardware issue until the year 2040, notes pleased Apple executives like Don Oehlert of the company's Chicago regional office.

Macintosh owners aren't out of the woods, however, because a great many of the programs now running on Macs were written for PCs as well and can have software prone to Y2K hiccupping even though the hardware itself is just fine for the next 40 years.

Happily, the bulk of PCs sold since 1997 also are Y2K compliant. One way to see about your particular machine is to check a list of machines certified as compliant by NSTL, the testing arm of CMP Publications, one of the largest publishers of computer industry trade journals.